Last week Denver launched Denveright, a campaign to collect input on the direction that planning and development in this city should take over the next twenty years. But residents already had plenty of ideas, as evidenced by all the comments that come in whenever we write about architecture and design…
Scott Shiller, CEO of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, spoke with us a few months ago for our Winter Arts Guide, sharing what every newcomer should know about the Denver arts scene. “Denver is a true ‘arts city’ with a national reputation for creating some of the best…
On May 21, the still-open Arapahoe Basin Ski Area celebrated sunny spring weather at Colorado’s Largest Swimwear Parade on Skis & Snowboards, which was just what it sounds like: a bunch of beautiful ski bums hitting the slopes wearing next-to-nothing for a lark. A-Basin shared its photos from the event…
Mockumentary Hitler’s Folly, at only an hour long, stretches its incredibly thin premise over a surface area the size of the European front. Its single, exhausting joke: Hitler, a misunderstood artist, actually built a Disney-style animation empire that was mistaken for a fascist regime. Bill Plympton is a singularly gifted artist…
It’s Friday night on Memorial Day weekend and you’ve chosen not to flee the city. Fortunately, Denver’s artist co-ops never go on vacation — so why not visit exhibit openings in art districts all over town? Ron Gerbrandt, Jesse Myers, Sarah Rockett, Karen Roehl Ice Cube Gallery May 26 through…
In the late 1800s, Colorado was a hub for people looking for a cure for tuberculosis; our dry air, high elevation and sunshine attracted hundreds of thousands of new residents coming from humid climates across the U.S. More than a century later, we’re still drawing newcomers looking for a healthier…
It’s Memorial Day weekend, which means one more day of fun — and the calendar’s full of everything from comedy to live music to donkeys to hug. Keep reading for our ten favorite events this weekend, and then head over to the Westword calendar for even more things to do.. Untitled Rising…
Denver moviegoers, your eyes do not deceive you. This weekend the Sie FilmCenter – our city’s home for the best in arthouse, foreign and independent film – is opening X-Men: Apocalypse, Bryan Singer’s latest big-budget entry in the comic book hero’s saga. This particular opening at this particular theater is a fascinating glimpse into…
Every year when we choose our picks for Best of Denver, we’re celebrating everything the city has to offer, from the best banh mi sandwich to the best all-day happy hour. If you’ve managed to make your way through even a portion of the Best Food and Drink awards in…
#80: Michael Henry New York native Michael Henry shuffled off from Buffalo, got an MFA at Emerson College and eventually ended up in Denver, where he and partner Andrea Dupree founded Lighthouse Writers Workshop in 1997, promising the community a beacon of literary arts where authors at all levels and…
At this point in film history, the slasher is firmly entrenched as one of the core horror genres. It’s been around seemingly forever. It’s been refined, perfected, deconstructed and reinvented multiple times. Even casual horror fans have seen enough slasher films to recognize the typical story beats and tropes that…
Even when working from source material crafted by others, Terence Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA. At once solemn and lusty, Davies’ page-to-screen transfer of Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel beautifully conveys human fragility, our bodies and minds outmatched by the brute indifference of…
Something troubling is afoot in Westeros: The heroes are beginning to outnumber the villains. The sixth season of Game of Thrones has already seen Jon Snow’s return from the dead, Arya Stark’s vision restored and — courtesy of two Stark children’s long-awaited reunion — the show’s first-ever tears of joy…
Outside of a movie-theater screen and red carpet, most celebrities go to great lengths to make themselves invisible. But most celebrities aren’t Shia LaBeouf. These days, the former child and action-adventure leading pretty boy-turned gonzo performer is known more for his bizarre and very public performance-art pieces and tabloid-famous exploits than for his starring roles in…
Even by the standards of Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster’s premise is a doozy: Colin Farrell plays a recently single schlub forced to report to the Hotel, where he has 45 days to form a romantic relationship lest he be turned into an animal of his choosing. This is the plight…
There’s a scene during the first half of Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse that is so emotionally resonant, so well-put-together and so quiet that you might briefly forget you’re watching a superhero film. It involves a raid by some Polish officers in the remote forest where Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael…
The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown…
At long last, Whit Stillman has adapted a Jane Austen book. To be sure, he has touched on her work numerous times — particularly in his 1990 directorial debut Metropolitan, in which an argument about Mansfield Park gave us the immortal line “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary…
In his archly empathetic comedies, Whit Stillman has long chronicled the uncertain ways in which young people of privilege launch themselves into worlds too in decline to offer them much. The debutante-ball life of Metropolitan or the nightclub and publishing circles of The Last Days of Disco are already dying before…
Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, Our Journey is back with suggestions for what to do “off the beaten trail” on Colorado’s central plains, “just outside your back door,” says the site. “Whether you enjoy photography as an artistic medium or as a hobby, there are plenty of subjects for…
It seems odd at this late date to think about seeing new silent films, but that’s what happening. “People are finding them everywhere,” says Tom Hart, program development coordinator for Boulder’s Chautauqua Auditorium and curator of the Chautauqua Silent Film Series. One rediscovered feature, Daughter of Dawn, will be featured…
There’s a spectacular solo on now at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Martha Russo: coalescere showcases selected works from the 25-year career of the innovative ceramics sculptor. But when I walked through the show with Martha Russo herself, she explained that she came to be interested in ceramics by…
